Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Pocket story


There is a pocket in my purple jumper: it's a magic door. Mother says I should stop telling lies. But it's true, although I'm sure I don't know how. The other end must come out near the ocean, for my handkerchiefs always smell of salt and seaweed. And things I put in it for safekeeping often go missing, only to reappear in my pocket sometime later, damp and sandy. Mother says I need to learn to take better care of my things. This morning a small crab, green as bottle, crawled out. It hid itself in the potted begonia. Mother won't be happy.

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time there was a story.  It was a little thing, small enough to hide under a chair or inside a tea cup, but it was powerful all the same.  It could be warm and fuzzy with gray green fur or form into a dark blue blob and slide itself under doors.

It said:
"Once upon a time, the world was created with words."

And that was enough.  It would curl up like a kitten at a child's feet and whisper, once upon a time, the world was created with words, and the child would start to dream of the words he knew and the world he could create and how things would be.  And the child would grow up and change the world with his words, creating a new world with each syllable.

And so many such children grew up, and so many such children created worlds with their words, but, alas, they had forgotten what the story had whispered to them and they did not know their own power.